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Author: Kamahl Santamaria

Very odd title I know. I was trying to play on the word apologist but I don’t think it worked.

Anyway…

I’ve lost track of the amount of times I’ve seen this block of text, or something similar, at the end of an email message:

Sent from my iPhone. Please excuse brevity, terseness, and typos

My response to that – as a fan of the English language – is no, why should I?

I think we can all agree that, to different extents, technology has made us lazy. We abbreviate a lot more than we used to… we sometimes revert 2 txt spk which I personally h8… and we send a lot more emails, texts and instant messages in a day than we ever did before.

But all that means that technology IS an acceptable part of life now. No-one is special or unique because they have a phone with a touchscreen keypad rather than a keyboard. So using technology as an excuse for not being accurate, or being terse in an email? Sorry, I don’t buy it.

Sure if you’re a journalist in a war-zone with bombs raining down, I think we’d forgive a bit of brevity. Actually wouldn’t it be great to see an email signature that said “Sent from my iPhone in the middle of Iraq. Constantly have the s**t bombed out of me so, you know, sorry if I hit a few incorrect keys, dude.”

But short of that scenario, the pedant in me can’t find room for an excuse. Yes I blog about the English language so I’m likely to be a bit more fussy about such things. But I really do believe in standards, and I think they’re taking a dive with all this fast-and-loose emailing. One starts to wonder where the everyday English language will be in another five or 10 years if this is how it’s being treated now.

And consider this – if you were to make mistakes in an email typed from your computer, would you have an apologist signature there too?

I tweeted my last post by saying “The words of my mentor, Tony Ciprian, in 140 characters or less”.

Of course, that should actually be fewer, not less.

And so I’m writing a whole new post to correct myself, and to explain the theory!

It appears a lot of people don’t know how to use the two words. I didn’t for some time. But now I find myself shouting at the television whenever I hear broadcasters and guests using the wrong word in the wrong situation.

The basic rule is can what I’m talking about be counted?

And if it can, you want to go with fewer.

Are there less cars on the roads today? No, there are fewer cars on the roads today… because cars can be counted. However you could say there’s less traffic on the roads… because traffic as a whole can’t be counted.

Less cake? Yes, but fewer slices of cake.

Fewer raindrops… (admittedly not something you’d often say)… but less rain.

Losing Cippo – and remembering all that he taught me – has brought on a very reflective period.

But in a professional sense, it’s been constructive. It’s made me look even harder at what I write and why I write it. I feel I’ve been subbing my scripts with more vigour, and with even less tolerance for ‘flimflam’ and sloppy writing.

Even this blog is a second draft.

It’s also prompted me to trawl through Cippo’s now-dormant twitter timeline… just to see if there were any more little nuggets there. Any more Cippoisms.

And the great man didn’t disappoint:

9 July 2013:“The Andy Murray headlines have ignored the fact that a Briton – Virginia Wade – won a Wimbledon singles title in 1977”

Far from being full of flapdoodle, Glen’s a smart guy… and he puts forward an interesting and solid case for why some words fall out of use.

Put simply, easier and more generation-appropriate words come into usage and replace old ones. His example was the word penultimate – which two of his former flatmates didn’t know – and which has been replaced by the basic second-to-last.

Glen also defends the word selfie which I have no problem with. That one definitely IS here to stay!

I guess I’m just an old romantic when it comes to words, Glen. To me, a quick obambulate around the market on a Sunday afternoon sounds positively ambrosial 🙂

Think of this is an immediate followup to my last post, where I bemoaned the “ability” of journalists to draw from a well of boring and often-nonsensical ‘stock phrases’.

The following is an excerpt from a fantastic book about the English language called Many a True Word. It’s written by Richard Anthony Baker, a man who spent 30 years as a journalist at the BBC. His writing is brilliant and I really do recommend the book. It’s one you can actually learn something from!

Under the subtitle LAZY LANGUAGE: SOME QUESTIONS Baker writes the following:

Why are readers so often avid? Is a beautiful speaking voice not just a beautiful voice? Has anyone heard of a dirty bill of health? Does anyone aspire to be just a pianist, rather than a concert pianist? Why is a hoax so frequently elaborate? Why do we talk about free gifts? Aren’t gifts always free? What is rude about good health? Shall we banish light entertainment until someone invents heavy entertainment? Need an old age be ripe? Are you allowed to be a recluse or must you always be something of a recluse? Are campaigners always tireless? Is it possible to be unaware without experiencing bliss? May we talk about obscurity rather than virtual obscurity? And will you allow me to be inadequate rather than woefully inadequate?

First of all, you can see where some of the inspiration for my last posting came from!

But Baker is so right. Ripe old age… woefully inadequate… blissfully unaware… tireless campaigner… elaborate hoax… these are all phrases which we lean-on in our writing for no real reason. Sure there’s nothing technically wrong or incorrect about them… that is, except for their overuse… and it’s that which turns them into those lazy stock phrases.

Richard Anthony Baker has another section in Many a True Word called SOME WORDS AND PHRASES THAT DAILY TELEGRAPH JOURNOS MUST NOT USE… but I’ll save that for another time!